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Bernie Madoff's Programmers Arrested
ZipK writes "With their former boss cooling his heels on a 150-year sentence, programmers Jerome O'Hara and George Perez are now in the US Attorney's crosshairs. They've been arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy, and 'accused of producing false documents and trading records at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in New York.' Apparently Madoff's fraud was too large and too complex to be foisted entirely by hand."
If you destroy evidence, make sure you destroy the backups, too.
So tell me, when are they going to go after the programmers at Goldman Sachs?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
And that's why we have cellscripts and conjobs
There are so many great opportunities out there for making a legitimate living programming that it makes me wonder why these guys volunteered to spend the best years of their lives stealing from people.
If you've followed the details of the Madoff scandal, it was obvious that it required substantial computer support.
Each month, Madoff's investors got statements which showed fictitious trades and fictitious profits. The phony trades were for real stocks, with prices which were (almost) real. But the trades were chosen retrospectively, which is like betting on a race after it's run. So superficially reasonable statements came out. This was all generated on an AS-400 that had been in use for this for several decades.
The software wasn't very good. If they'd been better at it, they could have generated statements which showed trades which exactly matched real trades of others (from the "tape"; trades are public but traders are anonymous), delivered trade confirmations every day, and still shown phony profits just by picking trades randomly distributed around the 75% of each day's trades. That would survive external examination, but not a real audit. Close looks at Madoff statements show trades which could not possibly have occurred; the price is outside the day's trading range. Sloppy.
I went to an engineering school that was founded in the aftermath of WW2, so had a strong ethos of: "scientists and engineers need to understand what we're doing and why, not just implement stuff other people tell us to". I.e., don't assume the people above you are in charge of the "why" and as the scientist/engineer all you need to care about is the "how". Usually it's seen as more of an ethics thing, but interesting to be reminded that on occasion it can be a matter of self-interest, too, since you have a legal responsibility to know what you're doing and why, at least to some minimum degree.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
any particular kind of metal you'd like the chains made from
Mercury.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
> That's 10% 10% barely covers overhead, and employee salaries.
Put simply, Profit = Revenue - Costs.
All overheads, salaries etc ARE costs. So Dell's $1.5b profit on sales of $14b isn't at all bad at all. It's very good.
What you're talking about is margin - the difference between the cost price of something and the sale price. The figure of "30%" is a generally accepted minimum margin for a business. I think it's based on a reseller. If you buy a box of paper in at $10, then you should have to sell it for $15 (plus tax if applicable) in order to survive. That $5 should cover all of your costs, with a little left over for profit.
I hate articles filled with lies.
Buffet routinely lobbied against the bailout legislation.
Buffet did lobby for bailouts of a different nature, in which the government would get voting stock in the companies they bailed out, there were clear stipulations on where money was spent (so it didn't go into pockets like his), and there was massive accountability.
When Buffet bailed out GE, he laid out such a framework and encouraged the government to follow suit. And while Buffet has a high personal worth because of stock he owns, he has always been know to live frugally, and is now giving away the massive bulk of his wealth.
However Buffet is a known conservative, so a liberally-slanted website is all but obligated to go on a character assassination for no good reason. (I'm neither Republican nor Democrat. I just hate lying. If anything, I support true liberalism, in which there is less government restriction period, and personal liberties are protected as much as possible).
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Very far from true.
The list of countries with no extradition treaties with the US is, more or less:
Afghanistan, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Armenia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, Chad, China (People's Republic of China), the Union of the Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d' Ivoire, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, Jordan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Madagascar, the Maldives, Mali, the Marshall Islands, Mauritania, the Federated States of Micronesia, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Niger, Oman, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Rwanda, Samoa, São Tomé & Príncipe, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Vanuatu, Vietnam, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Bhutan, Iran, Taiwan, Korea (North).
...Oh My God! Does this mean Bernie Madoff was a robot?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Buffet routinely lobbied against the bailout legislation.
Buffet is a smart man. And everyone was against the bailout legislation. Except of course those to be bailed out, and the Pelosi inspired politicians.
I still remember the reports when it was first mentioned. "All my constituents aren't saying "No", they're saying "HELL NO!"". All that got swept under a pile of money however.
It's curious for me that, living in Costa Rica, the US dollar has plummeted against our local currency - to the point where a can of Coke is now twice as expensive here versus in the US (due to local inflation continuing despite our currency appreciating against the dollar). I think soon US citizens won't be able to afford to travel outside the US. It's a real pain in the ass for me, because I earn in dollars, so I'm becoming relatively poorer too compared to my wife who earns in local currency. We're talking 10-15% poorer in the past 3 months alone. Running the money printing presses in the US has everything to do with this. But no one listened to Ludwig von Mises the first time, anyway.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For some reason I don't think we need an extradition treaty with Afghanistan..
Buffett is a Democrat.
And yes, Buffett did benefit from the bailouts... Not to mention Buffett recently tried to back Goldman's recent proposal to buy tax credits from Fannie Mae. He's not the boogeyman, but he's not the nice, friendly man with a sincere belief in capitalism that he is sometimes made out to be.
Madoff kept all of his billions of money in a single account at JP Morgan Chase bank. If they are going to bust his programmers, they should bust his bank too. Even for a bank the size of Chase, Madoff just leaving billions of dollars sitting in the account instead of investing it like he claimed to be doing must have gotten their attention one or a hundred times. If the bank looked the other way to hang onto a lucrative cash deposit, they are just as guilty as the programmers.